Ask HN: What's next in *social* Internet?

Social media seems to be a hot topic but with a lot of tension from two aspects:

(1) There is a lot of talk about developing and delivering more in social media. The more might be from things new in each of data sources, data manipulation techniques, Web sites, or companies. There might be more in just the content or in social search to find such content.

(2) There is not much clarity about just how to have more in social media or just why to have it. For the "why", what users want it, and what would they do with it?

Here are two examples of some of the recent talk about social media:

First, here on HN is the thread:

"Sergey Brin: We’ve Touched 1 Percent Of What Social Search Can Be (techcrunch.com)"

at

http://techcrunch.com/2011/01/20/sergey-brin-weve-touched-1-percent-of-what-social-search-can-be/

Second, is the thread "Building Better Social Graphs" at Fred Wilsons blog A VC* at:

http://www.avc.com/a_vc/2011/01/building-better-social-graphs.html#disqus_thread

with a lot of relatively good relevant comments.

So, let's dig in a little: We can start with being more clear about our terminology. There are three terms:

(1) Social Graph:

So, in applied math, the relevant definition of a graph is a collection of arcs and nodes with each node much like a geometric point and each arc a connection between two nodes (usually distinct but sometimes the same). An arc may be directed or not: A directed arc is drawn with an arrowhead and is regarded as a one-way street.

In a social graph, each node is likely a person (or maybe the blog of a person) but might be a group of people. The people might be users of Facebook, Twitter, etc. or just people who don't use the Internet. Then an arc might represent friend on Facebook, a follower on Twitter, or some such.

(2) Social Media:

Examples would include Facebook, Twitter, etc., maybe even HN. Maybe a definition of social media would be some Web site where people interact.

(3) Social Search:

Given data from social graphs and/or social media, one could do searches of that data.

To continue: There can be a problem with the concept of a social graph: Too commonly it is left unclear just what the arcs mean!

So, consider a person's social graph: They may have an arc to each person (A) they went to high school with, (B) live on the same street as, (C) went to college with, (D) dated, (E) married, (F) worked at the same company as, (G) hired to plow snow from their driveway, (H) got their business card at a Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, etc. So, the point of these examples is that there is enormous variety on what the arcs can mean.

So, to make progress, maybe usually we should be more clear on what the arcs mean!

Now to something more substantive:

In Fred Wilson's thread "Building Better Social Graphs", there were two strikingly different themes:

First, Wilson started the thread with a post where he wanted to be able to download each of his social graphs and then curate them himself.

Second, in the comments, the theme was strong that given the data on the social graphs, we should have computer-based means to process the data for curation, etc. Curiously, the goal of this processing was Wilson's "Building Better Social Graphs" by stronger means than just Wilson's manual curation! That is, Wilson's title was stronger than Wilson's post, and the comments were closer to the title than the post was!

So, from 40,000 feet up, it appears that many people have some vague, ill-defined, intuitive, poorly identified and articulated visions of making progress with social graphs. Each of the broad subject of social, Facebook, Twitter, and the Internet, is so big that we should take the visions, as crude as they are, seriously.

So, there are a lot of people (e.g., 500+ million users of Facebook, etc...